Twenty years ago on March 8, my entire first squad and number one machine gun team were killed in a late night mid-air helicopter collision over Ft. Campbell. Nine soldiers from a platoon of thirty and eight others including the air crews died under an overcast Kentucky sky, a little more than two hours before midnight. Almost certainly, the majority of those poor souls never knew what hit them. As for what hit me that night, I have never fully understood it. I have kept those men in my prayers all these years. I pray for them especially because they had no warning to pray for themselves, because I doubt they had prepared themselves for death. This anniversary reminds me of the contingent and vicarious nature of my being; a solemn warning that it is good to be attentive to my own preparation for the end.
On March 8, 1988, the soldiers were aboard the lead helicopter in a formation of three UH-60 Blackhawks. Moving at nearly eighty miles an hour some one hundred and seventy feet above the ground, they were flying back to base after conducting a training exercise in which they served as “Opposing Forces” to evaluate another unit’s combat readiness. The pilots were all using Night Vision Goggles. Another chopper, flying alone and on an unrelated mission, crossed paths with and clipped the tail rotor boom off my men’s aircraft. The main rotor blades of both machines meshed, and they plunged to the earth below. Fires immediately broke out. No one aboard survived. The pilots in the two trailing helicopters saw the collision developing and took evasive maneuvers, saving their own lives and the twenty infantrymen they carried as cargo. The factors contributing to the accident were complex; several procedures for managing air traffic over Ft. Campbell were changed after the tragedy.
The mission was supposed to have been a cake walk, so routine that my Platoon Sergeant handled it without me. I was away on pass at a Ft. Benning graduation ceremony, pinning a Ranger Tab on a dear friend’s shoulder. I arrived back at base the morning after to walk through the wreckage. In an open field, usually used as a landing zone for parachute drops, my eyes met a scene straight out of hell. Shards of fuselage and fragments of debris were strewn about like the aftermath of a hurricane. A molten airframe dominated the macabre scene about a hundred feet from a line of naked trees that hid the second UH-60’s remains. The crumpled shell of what had been a proud sixty-foot aircraft looked like a VW Bug overturned and burned in a riot. An intact tail rotor assembly lay curiously adrift in the field. Still upright and attached to its pylon, it was the only clear indication that the nearby pile of slag had actually been a helicopter. Along with a few MP’s and parked nearby, an undamaged Blackhawk stood lonely sentry over the site. It had been ordered grounded after landing to look for survivors in the moments following the crash.
White tape outlined the place where each body had lain. There were shreds of human tissue and blood on the grass where the young men had hit the ground, scattered from the troop compartment as they had fallen to the earth. It was an unworldly and disturbing site; I wish never to see another such again. Back at company headquarters, we sorted through salvaged rucksacks, ponchos, and combat gear. The charred equipment dripped water from the soaking given the scene by firefighters. I still physically recoil at the smell of wet burnt rubber. The acrid sting in the nostrils provokes visual memories I would rather keep dormant.
Since their unexpected deaths, I have prayed countless times for the souls of my nine men. In the Infantry, everyone goes by their rank, last name or a nickname. So I have prayed for SSG Alter, SGT Sabot, Hintz, Draper, Sayer, Jankowski, Franklin, Bath, and Rivas. It is like a mantra, asking God to have mercy on their souls. One time I was almost certain God told me I could stop praying for them, that they were all ok. I keep on doing it, just in case. Until this January, I could not bring myself to think about my men’s first names. It made them too real. Richard, Dennis, Samuel, James, Tim, Michael, Andrew, Clifford and Jeffery. That is how their loved ones knew them. I sometimes wonder if their families worry about their souls.
“You know neither the day nor the hour.” (Matthew 25:13) In the years following the collision, I have seen many other terrible events that came without warning: my company commander on fire and running from an explosion with terror in his eyes, one of my drivers burned so badly that his skin dripped like blackened Kleenex from his hands. As a physician, I have treated gang-bangers shot in the face and a man choking to death from a hemorrhaging neck tumor. Two summers ago, I happened upon a woman ejected from a car after it had hit a guardrail on the interstate. She was grey as a ghost, convulsing, and as near dead as you can get. I never learned if she made it, paramedics transported her to a local trauma center. I have had patients who died of brain aneurysms with no notice at all, and of colon cancer with months to consider their mortality. Like many of us, I saw images of men and women jumping to their deaths from the World Trade Center, on what they had thought of as an ordinary workday. Two of my best friends, a married couple, were almost killed this Christmas when their SUV rolled over twice after skidding on ice. They landed upside down in a snow bank: my twin 8 year-old Godchildren were in the vehicle with them. Accidents like these will make you wonder what comes after death.
Do we go to heaven when we die? I certainly like to think so. I am rather looking forward to finding out what happens. Contemporary Catholicism seems to focus on heaven more than on hell, but the Church has never done away with the idea of a fiery place in eternity for souls separated from God. One thing I don’t like to think about in regards to my long dead men is the Catholic teaching on sin and particular judgment. It seems that we Christians may hear things we don’t want to when called to account for our lives, “Depart from me, you accursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” (Matthew 25:41) As far as I know, my soldiers went to their maker unshriven like Hamlet’s father, “Cut off, even in the blossom of their sin.” It was not as if we had a priest available to hear our confessions every time we climbed into a bird.
No one expects to die on a routine flight in peacetime. Maybe my men were right with God when they died, but my fear has always been that at least one of them may not have been. They died so fast, there may have been no time to say, “I’m sorry” or “I love you.” Even if they knew the prayer, there was no time for the Catholics among them to mutter the Act of Contrition: a prayer asking forgiveness for sins and the grace of conversion. My more hopeful side thinks that God gives you time to repent on your way up, if you did not do so here below. Certainly we have cause to hope and trust in God’s mercy. He is generous and forgiving, like the father of the prodigal son. (Luke 15) Jesus tells us, “It is not the will of your heavenly Father that one of these little ones be lost.” (Matthew 18:14) Please God, let this be true.
When I think about unexpected death, I just hope my guys are happy. Their sudden departure from this world reminds me to keep myself in right relationship with God, to say my own Act of Contrition when conscious of grave sin. I reprint it here for my readers: “O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee, and I detest all my sins because of Thy just punishments, but most of all because they offend Thee, my God, Who art all-good and deserving of all my love. I firmly resolve, with the help of Thy grace, to sin no more and to avoid the near occasions of sin. Amen.”
You may want to say this prayer yourself, in case your chopper goes down tonight. Given the way the end surprised my men, I certainly will. Eternal rest give unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them. Amen.
Dr. William Blazek is a Jesuit Scholastic teaching medicine and ethics at Georgetown University. A graduate of the U.S. Army Ranger School and veteran of the First Gulf War, he served as an Infantry Captain in the 101st Airborne Division before training as a physician.
